Category: writers

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blog tour nostalgia ramble switzerland writers

Return to Eggli Mountain

On top of the Eggli. No skis.

As I tell kids when I visit schools, the Eggli mountain near the Swiss town of Gstaad is where I broke my leg skiing, the ‘lucky break’ which gave me the time and mental space to start my writing career.

I hadn’t been back – until today! Visiting my brother Michael and his family, I joined them at the top of the mountain. In fact I’m writing this post whilst sitting on a deck chair, facing the sun and a gorgeous view of gleaming snowy mountains. In fact…is that a tinge of tanning I can feel on my face?

Michael has given me his iPod with his playlist of Ed Reardon’s Week. Essential listening for writers, I’m assured. It’s probably because I insisted that we check to see if the airport WHSmith’s had my books. All authors torture themselves like this. Luckily I left happy – they had ZERO MOMENT.

My tiny, three year old nephew and niece are schussing around the piste as if the skis were extensions of their legs.

I’m in the middle of a bunch of author visits – last week with kids from St Edmund’s in Hindhead, Bampton Primary, Cheney School Oxford, and St Bartholomews, Newbury. Next week – College du Leman in Geneva. Photos and a big round-up to follow.

Coming soon: On March 10th Children’s author Katherine Langrish and I swap blogs for the day! Two teenage readers, Libby and Patrick Caffrey have read West of the Moon, a new abridged version of Katherine’s Troll Fell trilogy, and also The Joshua Files. They’ve put together some questions for Katherine and I – we’ll be answering on 10th March. It’s all part of Katherine’s West of the Moon blog tour.

I’ve been reading WEST OF THE MOON and telling a very simplified version to my three-year old niece and nephew. Trolls stealing young children, evil Uncles Baldur and Grim, it’s going down a storm! I overheard my nephew playing a game later which featured Uncle Baldur as the villain…

Ah. The shiny shiny snow beckons. Maybe I should take a little walk around the top of the mountain.

Categories
appearances rants writers

Save the Libraries – Kennington (Part 1 of 2)

MG at Kennington Literary Festival (photo by Mostly Books)

It’s all over the Internet and the news – to save money, local governments plan to close down some libraries. In Oxfordshire, 20 of 43 local libraries are threatened with closure. The communities are protesting, demonstrating, writing letters. This is the moment to persuade the county councils to change their minds!

I’m involved with the Save the Kennington Library Campaign. I’ve written before about this lovely village library and the Kennington Free Literary Festival that the community organises to support their library.

Local primary school children who use the Kennington Library have written letters to Cllr Keith Mitchell, who leads the Oxfordshire County Council. The Save the Library campaigners have written to Cllr Mitchell and to local MP, Nicola Blackwood, inviting them both to tea with the kids on February 7th, and to receive the letters of petition.

I’ll be joining with Korky Paul, an Oxford neighbour and illustrator of many wonderful children’s books (including Winnie the Witch), to read to the Kennington children.

Local media have also been invited to record the event. We’re very much hoping that Cllr Mitchell will turn up!

Here’s an excerpt of a letter I wrote to both.

The Government proposes to radically overhaul education, which I support. In that instance, it isn’t proposing to close schools and let natural selection take over! Libraries deserve the same, albeit on a smaller scale.

Please – consult with stakeholders, ask for proposals and bring in examples of best practice.

Don’t just cut a hole in the heart of the community. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that because some people don’t personally use a service, they don’t have an interest in its existence. Where would we be if we took that approach with every publicly-funded institution?

Libraries and civilisation go hand in hand. What do we rightly regard with horror as one of the existential crises in Western civilisation? The burning of the Library of Alexandria!

Please use your influence and act to serve the community who elected you.

Please show that this matters to you!

I’m involved in the Campaign to Save the Kennington Library. This is a perfect example of a local library that should be supported. It is the Big Society in action. The community run a Free Literary Festival (see attached article from The Oxford Times), which raises awareness and funds for the Kennington Library. The library is used regularly by local primary schools, in effect providing an extension of their own library provision. Without that library people for whom mobility is an issue will have difficulty getting to town.

So…roll on February 7th…! I will post a report from the event, right here on the blog.

UPDATE: To see how it all turned out, see Save the Libraries – Kennington (Part 2 of 2)

Categories
dark parallel other books writers

A 2011 Round-Up

The Joshua Files - Dark Parallel proofs
The Joshua Files - Dark Parallel proofs

I know, the New Year ’round-up’ should refer to the previous year. But I’m exhausted just thinking about it. In general, I’m starting the year tired. “Why do we have New Year?” my Teenage Daughter asked me. “How is it a ‘new beginning’? If you commit a crime on Dec 31st 2010, you’d still be punished in 2011.”

So it is with seasonal illness. If you spend the Christmas/New Year period suffering repeated attacks from viruses and secondary sinus infections, you start the year exhausted.

Lots happened last year and mostly very good, luckily for me. But with a diary that is getting packed out, I’d rather look ahead. So here are my forward-looking highlights of 2011.

  1. My sister’s wedding. Little Sister is getting married in Melbourne, Australia, giving me a lovely excuse to visit.
  2. First ever visit to school in Europe (outside of UK). Looking forward to meeting the students of College Leman in Geneva!
  3. Publication of Joshua Files book 4 – DARK PARALLEL. The photo shows the stack I’ll be sending off today to winners of the New year’s prize draw and to some book bloggers who have expressed special enthusiam for Joshua.
  4. A decision about After Joshua, What Next? If you follow this blog you may have heard me refer to Ultra Secret New Project. Well, New Editor has now read the manuscript and given me some pointers about how to improve it. So it won’t be much longer before I find out… (AL Kennedy saved me the bother of writing about what it’s like waiting for an editorial report over Christmas in her blog post Waiting for book ‘go’… Basically – what she said.)
  5. Teenage Daughter’s UCAS application is in. Will there be offers? Will she get the grades? Is this the year when my Firstborn Leaves Home?
  6. My first London Book Fair. Big trade fairs make me dizzy, as I learned when running an IT business. Without a stand to focus on or a conference speech to make, I get terribly baffled and have to go and lie down. So I’d foresworn never to attend a Book Fair unless invited as a speaker. I’ll be talking alongside Francesca Simon (author of Horrid Henry) about school libraries, in an event run by the School Libraries Association.
  7. Book deals! My fingers are tightly crossed for two ridiculously talented friends of mine from very long ago. Sarah Hilary (crime writer) and Christian David (author of a rollicking historical biography-fiction) are both writers who secured literary agents last year. They are now working on edits prior to the big submission process – to editors! I won’t be happy until they are recognized for the huge literary talents that they are.

It’s a particularly lovely set of events. No lurking gremlins as yet. However, I find it easier not to look too far into the future. The plots of my own stories almost always involve calamity striking the minute everything seems to have gone calm. Not that I enjoy such a rollercoaster in my own life. I try to make lemonade when served lemons. Nevertheless, it gets increasingly tiring, all that lemonade-making. That’s what they don’t tell you about getting older. Yes, you get wiser and more experienced, so lots of things are easier. But your energy levels diminish.

No wonder people turn to magic beans and nutrional supplements and exotic exercise regimes. If only all it took was Berocca.

However, I am still aching pleasantly from the weights I did at the gym a few days ago. I will change nothing! Maybe lose a little weight to look good in the Diane Von Furstenberg dresses.

Happy New Year!

If you haven’t seen it yet – here’s the draw for the advance review copies of DARK PARALLEL. Once again I’m assisted by Matt Barnard from Summertown Starbucks.

Categories
comics writers

Remembering Vincent

There’s a friend of mine that I’ve blogged about before, Christian Pattison, who writes as Christian David. He’s been stomping around Summertown lately in his leather jacket, putting together his latest scripts and the novel and also The Vincent Fund.

It’s a memorial to the man he worked with for twenty years, good as: Vincent John McKeown, an incredible project that deserves wide support: a fund to help disabled people and their carers to enjoy the arts.

Christian is telling stories inspired by Vincent’s life, which ended abruptly last year after a long struggle with multiple sclerosis. Christian has spent most of life since graduating as a carer for the disabled, whilst also producing an amazing variety of artistic works (novels, plays, musicals, poems, as well as literary underground art/poetry/pop magazine, The Illustrated Ape.)

The web comic (gorgeously illustrated by Charles Cutting) is a series that begins with Vincent eschewing the afterlife (upstairs it’s Sunday every day and there’s a lot of Kum-bye-ahh; downstairs it’s always Monday morning and full of venial misery, as well as horned-ones in suits). Instead, Vincent chooses another, purely poetic route…

Vincent was a poet and a lecturer before the MS made work impossible. Christian used to accompany Vincent to as many arts events as possible. (They became experts on all the churches of Oxford too…) But it often took effort – try using the London Underground if you’re disabled…

So now the idea is to raise money so that other disabled people and carers can enjoy something that they don’t get as much chance to do as they might like. You can give money via the website to help for transport, or donate tickets. (Hint – putting on a show? Know any theatre producers? Tell them about The Vincent Fund!)

Categories
appearances writers

A night of KLQ and Booked Up fun

More excitement on the Kids Lit Quiz and Booked Up front. Last week I joined the author’s team at the Oxfordshire & Berkshire heat of the Kids Lit Quiz, only to miss an historic finale because I had to swoosh off to That London for a Booked Up launch party.

(I love the swooshing to That London. It sounds very glam and so it is! Whizzing off on a train to some distant part of the capital to drink wine, eat canapes and meet lovely children’s authors and the movers and shakers in the Book Trust, who do so much for kids literacy in the UK that it’s not funny to imagine life without them.)

Anyway, the author team starred the inimitable Lucy Coats, the adorable Mark Robson, the quietly brilliant Susie Day, the Next Big Thing in teen historical fiction, Marie-Louise Jensen (yep, the former editorial director at Scholastic told me that), and a new friend, Joanne Kenrick, who I know from FaceBook and the kids lit world, but met for the first time that night.

Normally the combined intellect of Susie, Mark and Lucy alone would be fine to win the heat, beat all the kids, pah, see THAT?!

But not that night. It was an historic night, destined to bring the highest number of teams ever to participate in a heat (42), as well as the highest ever score in the KLQ (97.5).

St Gregs KLQ team 1 2010 (3rd place)

The author’s did not get the highest score, nope. The winners did – Oxford High, those brilliant girls. Joshua Files fans too, good on ’em!

(ahem – added belatedly. Apparently I’m wrong, the author’s team did win, by half a point. But their score flashed past in a moment onscreen and we never mention it when the authors win…)

However, the photo shows not the winning team (who for my money may go on to win the UK Championship next week). Instead, it shows the 3rd placed team from St Gregory the Great – the school of which I’m a governor. It’s only the second time we’ve fielded a team, and these guys had to beat former heat winners Cherwell in a tie-break for the 3rd position.

So three cheers for the Saints! And what an achievement by Oxford High – 1st and 2nd place, as well as a record-breaking score!

I missed all the excitement, alas. Still, I had big fun in London, met the lovely people on the selection panel who so kindly included Invisible City in the Booked Up list for 2010. Met Chris Priestly, whose amazing Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror helped me to give our daughter such a great Halloween. And Steve Cole, author of so many hit kids titles (Astrosaurs and Z-Rex, to name only two) that he makes me feel like a slacker.

Turns out that Steve Cole and I share a teenage passion for Blake’s 7. Oh the geekiness in the air as we quoted favourite episodes… Then I had to rush off to catch a train. I didn’t get round to telling Steve Cole how much Blake’s 7 fan fiction I’d written. Just as well. Sometimes I get all silly and start pressing it on fellow B7 fans. Never wise…

Steve Cole blogged about the Booked Up party too. And I may have mentioned Blake’s 7 before.